Here is the post calm-balm set. The chart at the top right shows the introduction of calm balm with three sharp peaks. The sleepiness is all converted to sleepiness backup and when the creature rests, it produces sleepase which converts sleepiness into sleepiness back up.

Next, here’s my peek at a normal norn sleep cycle. While it’s less extreme than the example above, with time, sleepiness backup actually does fill up on its own.

But then I wanted to know what caused a creature to fall asleep. If it wasn’t sleepiness or sleepiness back up, what was it?

In the first picture, it looked like tiredness (green) might be what causes him to rest and fall asleep. He didn’t fall asleep despite the sleepase and when he got up to move again, it was all converted back to sleepiness backup.

As sleepiness backup built up in his system, so did his tiredness. He rested here, marked by the increase in sleepase but he didn’t fall asleep.

At one point, though, his tiredness and sleepiness backup and his tiredness got very high and he fell asleep.

He actually continued to sleep long after his tiredness was drained and actually slept til his sleepiness was very low. This looked just like the sleep charts from calm balm use.

Just to make sure I wasn’t completely insane (I’ll admit, I was brutally exhausted when I did the other two parts) I simulated giving him Calm Balm by giving him 3 injections of sleepiness and one of tiredness since, as far as sleep is concerned, that’s all Calm Balm does.

Here, he’d actually fallen asleep. In the first chart, the sleepiness is immediately converted to sleepiness backup. Once he feels tired, he rests and sleepase takes effect, as in the second chart. If there’s enough sleepiness while he’s resting, he falls asleep and his tiredness and sleepiness both return to normal levels. Really, this isn’t any different from a normal sleep pattern and shouldn’t cause any problems. if anything, this just makes Calm Balm a great sleep aid for creatures who have trouble sleeping!

So go nuts using the stuff! I hope this was helpful and that the entire segment wasn’t a horribly written mess.

I started checking these chemicals as I learned more about sleepiness and calm balm. This time, I’d started with a completely fresh creature who’d never tasted calm balm before. This one was also a baby boy bengal norn.

At this point, I was really confused. I understand that sleepiness and sleepiness backup are converted into each other. In the genome, the equation works like this:

You end up with the same amount of Sleepase at the end of the equation. It really just converts sleepiness backup to Sleepiness.

The next gene reads

1 Sleepiness = 1 Sleep bkp
Reaction Rate: very fast.

All I could figure was that sleepase wasn’t converting sleepiness back up as quickly as the scanner scrolled and that, maybe, sleepase was only produced once sleepiness reached a certain level. My creature wasn’t sleeping, though, so why was his sleepiness going down and instead being converted to sleepiness backup?

I understood that when a creature says that he’s sleepy, he probably means that his sleepiness is high, not his sleepiness backup. But why was his sleepiness decreasing even after his sleepiness backup has plateaued? Searching for answers, I checked his genome against the C3/DS Standard Norn Genome in genecompare and found no differences in regard to his sleepiness, sleepase or sleep backup genes.

This, I hate to admit, I can’t make any sense of. You can click on the image to see an enlarged version of it. Any advice or guidance on these genes would be hugely appreciated. The first, I’m sure, pretty much means that he’s constantly producing sleepiness, which makes sense. The second, I’m not entirely sure about and the third image I really have no idea about. Determined to find out whether Calm Balm was genuinely bad or not, I just had to do one last experiment.

This time, I just wanted to monitor the creature’s natural sleep patterns.

In the end, I was left with a lot more questions, like why does the creature continue to sleep despite the sleepiness and sleepiness backup being drained all the way down to zero? Did I miss some chemicals while I was testing the calm balm? I had ideas, but in the end, I decided that Calm Balm was completely harmless. In any case, it helps creatures sleep and it calms them down when they’re angry.

I’ve already discussed in earlier posts that creatures are capable of learning that those nifty calm-balm potions are effective at decreasing anger and that once grendels learn about it, they’ll drink the potion when they get angry.

The wiki states that calm balm can kill a creature if they have too much of the stuff, so am I really better off letting them slap the hand or each other? Am I better off letting them yell all the time to release their stress?

This bit of research sets out to find out why the wiki might state that the useful potion is dangerous.

I took a normal bengal norn and stuck it in the infirmary. In my previous tests with calm balm, I noticed that the only things that changed were anger and sleepiness.

First, I needed a baseline to go off of. I hatched a baby Bengal Norn and watched his chart, without giving him anything.

He wasn’t angry and he was newly hatched, so I wasn’t expecting either of these to get very high.

Next, I introduced some calm balm into our situation.

After observing my grendels falling asleep after having calm balm, I was expecting this. Each little peak corresponds with a sip of the potion. The sleepiness steadily decreased on its own.

Since I haven’t had a creature over-dose on the stuff, I decided to go ahead and go nuts, and let the little norn have as many potions as I could cram into his mouth.

Here’s what happened here. He fell asleep right away and his sleepiness decreased steadily until his sleepiness was low enough for him to wake up on his own. The dips are from me picking him up. The room doesn’t detect him if I’m holding him up. Otherwise, he seemed perfectly happy. This is when I started to feel frustrated. I then started ‘resetting’ our little norn friend by letting him get the calm balm out of his system. Finally, I just had to check to make sure that his anger was being affected by the potions. I injected him with anger and gave him a potion.

I injected him with a lot of anger but one potion was enough to get his rage down to a much more manageable level. So far, all I could see were benefits. I was still pretty curious about why the creatures wiki said that the potion “can kill other creatures if they take too many”. (http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Calm_Balm) I kept digging.

I checked every chemical from 0 to 138. I just had to stop here, and you’ll see why in a minute.

Um. What? Sleepase and Sleepiness Backup were doing what I thought they were supposed to. I couldn’t be completely sure so I dug still deeper. (I’d forgotten to check tiredness, but we’ll get to that at a future date.)